When I Lived in Modern Times (20 page)

F
INALLY
Johnny came. He looked glossy and well-washed. Only football miseries could make him disheveled. “Shit, Evelyn, what the hell has happened to you?” he said, holding me in his arms. He looked around. “Have they been taking good care of you?”

“No.”

“No?”

“How could you let them do this to me?”

“What have they done?” He looked at me. “Are you angry?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. I know that anger. I’ve seen it. Tell me everything, angry girl.”

I told him. He smiled when I spoke of the rude girl. He was expressionless when I told him about the middle-aged man who thought I was a slut.

“Fine,” he said. “Get your things. We’re going.”

“Do I have to wear this wig? I hate it.”

“You’re safest in the wig, but it’s up to you. You’re not stupid. Make your own judgments. It seems I can’t be around to protect you all the time. I wish I could, with all my heart I do. But it’s impossible. I have to recognize that.”

As we were walking out, he turned his head and said something in Hebrew to the middle-aged man. He spoke very fast. The man shrugged. Johnny put down my Selfridges suitcase, walked over and punched him in the face. The man was howling, blood was running from his nose. This gave me a warm feeling inside. A fatherless child, I had a man who was prepared to commit an act of violence in my defense. I looked at Johnny and was sexually aroused. If I had told him what I felt, I know what he would have said: “This is normal, it’s natural.”

For a few minutes I no longer wanted to be a free woman. I wanted to be Johnny’s little hausfrau. I wanted to be a soldier’s wife who cooked for her husband and tended his battle wounds. I wanted his children. Is it not
nice to have someone to take care of you, not to have to think for yourself? Isn’t it a rest from the tumult of living?

“Where are we going, Johnny?” I asked him as he strapped my suitcase to the back of the Norton.

“Not far. Not far at all.”

“I don’t like Manshieh. I don’t want to stay here.”

“Not Manshieh. Somewhere else.”

He took me to a place I had never been, called Neve Tzedek, hadn’t even noticed it in my wanderings around the city. It was a lost world, far to the south, almost in Jaffa.

“What is this place?”

“It’s old. Older than Tel Aviv.”

“How can that be?”

“Sometime in the last century Jaffa was getting overcrowded and the Jews built a suburb for themselves. Now it’s part of Tel Aviv. We’ve swallowed it up.”

We drove into a maze of sun-bleached houses built in a different style. Neve Tzedek was quietly crumbling into dust. The narrow streets were broken. Weeds and flowers grew everywhere and date palms pitched themselves up wherever there was space for them to grow. Everything was small in Neve Tzedek, including the people: the women who trudged along with their shopping, the men carrying bits of machines rendered down far below any obvious function. Stray dogs shat themselves without disturbance from embarrassed owners. There were no sounds of any traffic. No cars. It was very peaceful. It was cool but above us the sky was very blue. Johnny took me to a school.

“You can stay here,” he said. “You can pretend to be a teacher and teach the children something. Art maybe. But if there’s a fire, get out fast.”

“Why?”

“It’s an arms cache.”

“Do the teachers know that?”

“Sure.”

This was nice. It was very nice. It was pleasant. I was going to be part of a community of intelligent people. I was looking forward to it. Perhaps I really would become a teacher one day, why not?

Johnny was talking to a woman. She was shaking her head.

“No go,” he said, when he came back.

“Why?”

“It isn’t as safe as I hoped.”

“Where to now?”

“Don’t worry, darling, we’ll find somewhere.”

I got back on the bike. I was being ferried around the city like an unwanted parcel.

Next we drove a short distance to a single-story house that was painted the color of ochre. Short palm trees obscured the windows. Dry, broken shutters hung half-open. Johnny opened the door which was not locked.

“Ah. This is okay,” he said.

“What’s this?” I asked him as we went inside. It was cold and the light was dim and the shadows that it cast had blurred edges. Old chairs and tables stood, covered in dust.

“It’s deserted, abandoned. I don’t know how long, people don’t want to live in places like this anymore and who can blame them? It must be sixty years old. I like new things, new places, don’t you, Evelyn?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking of my apartment on Mapu with its revolutionary kitchen.

“But this is good. It’s okay for now. You’ll have to get water but I can fix that. Look, the stove works.” He craned his neck upward. “Hey, the roof’s good. No holes, no leaks.” He turned to me. “Darling, I’m going to get you food and blankets, everything you need. You’re going to be fine here. It won’t be long. How can it be long?”

“Can I go out?”

“Yes. Go out as long as you’re careful. It’s a good neighborhood. No one will betray you. The British don’t come here. Watch out for the Arabs but they won’t bother you if you keep your head. You’ll be fine.”

He went away and left me alone. I sat down on a chair and felt very, very tired. I felt like Mrs. Linz when she arrived in Palestine and they took her to that place where she saw the Yemenites for the first time and she had sat on her suitcase and cried. I was in a foreign country, too, in exile from the white city.

He came back an hour later with blankets, sheets, a paraffin lamp, enough food to feed an army. “I took this from my parents’ house. I don’t know what the hell my mother will say when she finds out.” He giggled. “Hey, go and make up the bed.”

We lay down together and said nothing for a while. He began to make little soothing noises to me. He started to sing me a lullaby and I cried again, for it was the lullaby my mother had sung to me when I was a child, a Yiddish song: “
Schlof, mein may-dele schlof
,” he sang.

“How do you know that?” I asked him through my tears.

“Everyone knows it,” he told me.

We made love very quietly. Peace came down on the world. We slept for a while. Then the muezzin sounded, slipping from Manshieh into the
alleys of Neve Tzedek, and Johnny said, “I suppose it’s dusk. I suppose I have to go now. I hate to leave you on your own.”

“I’ll be okay,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

He got up and dressed. He leaned forward to lace his boots. I kissed him again. “Yes, yes. I’ll be back. I’ll bring you books and newspapers. Just tell me what you need. I’ll get you a radio, no problem. Oh. Shit, that isn’t possible. No electricity.” He touched my face. “Darling, Bolton’s never going to find you. Forget him. Just use your head and you’ll be safe.”

So I was alone with silence. It was so quiet in the house and in the alleys outside. For years I have tried to figure out the difference between loneliness and solitude. In Manshieh, guarded by those two terrible men, I was lonely. Here I felt at rest. Time stopped. It just gave up and stopped dead in its tracks. Nothing happened. It was as if someone had pulled its plug out from the mains. There was nothing to power it forward.

Every day a child would knock on my door and give me a newspaper, which I never read. Johnny had arranged that. Soon, the child arrived with a sketch pad and pencils and a cheap tin box of watercolors. I imagined Johnny on his bike weaving through the violent noise of the insistent city thinking of me, trying to guess what I wanted.

The days drifted but I wasn’t bored. Sometimes I went out and had short, rudimentary conversations in Hebrew with my neighbors who did not bother me, just as Johnny said. It was a place where people minded their own business. We talked about nothing, the nothing that is everything if you do not preoccupy your mind with higher things such as ridding yourself of colonialists or the struggle to become a free woman: a baby’s tooth coming through; a bad back; a fickle lover; how to get stains out of your best dress.

One day, venturing along the street in my wig and my modest clothes, I came across a man sitting at a wooden table on which there were four typewriters.

“What languages do you speak?” I asked him in Hebrew.

“All of them,” he said.

“Not really?”

“Pretty much.”

“What are you doing?” I asked him in English.

“I’m the typewriter. I write letters for people. I have four keyboards, Roman, Hebrew, Cyrillic and Arabic.”

“What letters do you write?” The fingers that tapped the keys also tapped a long column of ash from his cigarette.

“I type love letters and letters to creditors and letters to doctors and letters to mothers and letters to sons. And sometimes to fathers. I am the author of many fictions, as you can imagine. Last week I wrote a letter to Poland saying that the sender was doing very well and was rich and had married a high-born lady from Warsaw when in fact he’s a house burglar and lives with an Arab girl. But that can’t be written because it’s not a Zionist message you want to send back to over there. Yesterday I wrote a suicide note for an illiterate woman. Another woman, who came from the camps, wanted to dictate her memoirs to me for possible publication but though it was probably a lucrative commission in terms of its length, I said no. No one wants to read about those times. I told her, forget it, no one is interested.”

“What did you do before you became a typewriter?”

“I was a doctor. We’re overflowing with doctors here. We’re like ants in an anthill. I sometimes perform abortions if I can get the work but it’s more infrequent than typewriting. Jews want more Jews these days, not less. Anything you want written?”

“No. But thank you.”

I left him there in the sunshine, at his table which he rented for a few mils from the woman whose house he sat outside.

I went home and stretched out and waited until it was time to go overground once more. My body felt heavy and round. My breasts seemed enormous in my hands.

After a few days I stopped wearing the wig. The dark roots of my hair were showing through. The children were frightened of me at first, then they laughed and pointed. I laughed too. My eyebrows were growing back but I didn’t have any tweezers to pluck them with.

The child brought notes from Johnny. He couldn’t come. But he would. If I needed to get a message to him, give it to the child. The child would be there every morning without fail. I could be sure of that. He was being paid.

I began to plan a picture of Tel Aviv in olden times, in the 1920s before they built the white city. From the vantage point of my painting you are standing at a window. A table to the left holds a plate with an oversized orange and a banana and next to these a green pot containing a plant with pink leaves and pink stems. The street is populated by small figures, couples walking together, a woman carrying some kind of burden on her head, a tethered donkey. The houses on each side, framed in the window’s view by pink curtains edged heavily in scalloped lace, have
wrought-iron balconies and on the right there is a three-story octagonal structure of colonnaded recesses from Turkish times but really it is a mongrel, a mixture of bits of buildings I had seen, jumbled together.

The charm of these arrangements is disturbed by two elements: the first is a series of pylons on the left-hand side of the road with cables stretching above the rooftops; the second is that the street leads down to the sea—not a sun-dappled, azure stretch of water, but a black roiling ocean on which a two-funneled ship vomiting smoke is powered by formidable engines to the shore.

I dreamed about my picture the night I first imagined it and for many years to come. I dreamed that, like Alice, I stepped through the glass into the painting and walked along the street toward the shore. I stopped a strolling couple along my way and asked them, what is this place? Where am I? But they were dumb and could not speak. I stopped the woman with the burden on her head. Where am I? I said. And she looked at me, with surprise, and answered, home.

My painting speaks of the command to return from exile and I had obeyed the injunction. Was home. Whatever happened, I would never leave Palestine, this strange, violent, mixed-up place where things were not always pleasant, indeed rarely so. Where people’s manners were bad and they spoke roughly, but to the point. Where everyone came from somewhere else and everyone had a story to tell and these stories were not always inspiring or lovely. Where life was chaotic, because that is what life is. Where the past was murky and tragic and the future had to be grasped by the throat. Where Europe ended and the East began and people tried to live inside that particular, crazy contradiction.

I sat outside the derelict house in the shade of the date palms and I was dreaming, as God in some stories is said to be dreaming the world and all of us in it, going about our business. I was dreaming Tel Aviv, from the towers of Jaffa and its fishing fleet, through Neve Tzedek to the white city and beyond where it ran out into sand and there was nothing but orchards and orange groves and Arab villages which meant nothing to me, nor me to them.

The child stopped coming and I forgot to wonder why. I had everything I needed, I was self-sufficient and every day was more or less the same.

T
HEN
time, which had slowed down, began to speed up again. Mrs. Linz would start shouting at me if I ever saw her again for I had no excuse. I looked at the moon and I knew that I was my mother’s daughter, the hairdresser’s daughter, not a freedom fighter for Zion against the might of the Empire.

Where was the child? I asked the typewriter but he didn’t know who I was talking about. There were lots of children littering the alleys of Neve Tzedek, who could distinguish between them? He looked at me. “Is there anything else I can do for you apart from type a letter?”

“No,” I said. “Definitely not.”

“Good,” he said. “Excellent. Congratulations. A new baby for the new land of Zion. What will we call the baby? What will we call the new land? Some people want to name our child Israel.”

What would Johnny say? He would say, “This is normal. This is natural.” I just had to find a way of communicating the situation to him. So despite everything I was very, very happy.

Something had entered my bloodstream which stopped me from using my head, the hormones that tell women that childbirth doesn’t hurt and babies sleep all the time. Why had the little boy disappeared? No. I couldn’t think of a reason. Johnny said he would come because he was being paid, so where was he? It took me two days to understand that the child was no longer in Johnny’s employ. He wasn’t getting his wages. And the only reason for that was that Johnny wasn’t around to give them to him.

In the abandoned house, I went to the pile of newspapers. I looked at the dates. January had come and I hadn’t noticed. It was 1947 now.

Incidents were taking place daily. The roads and railways were mined. There were raids on army installations. A district police headquarters had been bombed with a hundred casualties. A British judge had been abducted by the Irgun while in the middle of presiding over a case in a Tel
Aviv court. A British businessman had also been kidnapped and the two of them were being held hostage until there was a stay of execution for Dov Gruner, the Irgun boy who was still being held at Acre. In London an MP said in parliament, “The British Empire is being insulted by a bunch of gangsters.”

There was a small item about the capture of a middle-ranking Irgun terrorist. Johnny’s face looked out at me from the page. He was named as Levi Aharoni and a number of other aliases followed. The trial seemed to have taken place very quickly. There was a short report of some courtroom exchanges. “Yesterday we fought the Jerries together, now do you want to know why I turn my guns against you?” Johnny had said.

“No politics,” the judge had ordered.

“Look at British justice, they won’t let me talk, even.”

His commanding officer gave testimony that he had been a fine soldier and that it was a great blow to find out that he had been a traitor and a terrorist. The judge sentenced Johnny to death for a string of atrocities stretching back to just after the end of the war. About twenty dead were specifically named.

“Count how many telephone poles there are in Palestine,” Johnny had shouted as they led him off, “because that’s how many coffins you’ll have to prepare if you’re going to execute me.”

The condemned man was held in Acre prison, the report concluded.

I lay on the floor reading this. I was very, very cold. My limbs felt like lead. My hair was full of dust. The baby was shriveling inside me.

I heard Mrs. Linz’s voice in my head, sounding in an echo chamber. “It is as I always warned you,” she said. “Those who choose the gun will fail and end up in shallow graves or at the end of a noose.”

“Oh go away you bloody bitch,” I cried. “Leave me alone.”

I stood up and walked down the street to find the typewriter. He was sitting at his table reading the paper.

“What’s going on?” I asked him. I looked around, the whole world seemed unfamiliar.

“Today I typed a letter for…”

“No. In the city.”

“We might be near the end,” he said. “They’re sick of the situation. The government is about to bring in martial law.”

“What will that mean?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how the British operate. I hear they are bringing a lot of new troops into the country. They’re sending the women and children back to England.”

“I don’t know what to do,” I said, to no one in particular.

“Go home,” he said, kindly. “Wait. That’s what we’re all doing, waiting. Waiting for the new state to be born. Just wait. It won’t be long.”

“Then what?”

“Who knows?”

I walked back to the abandoned house, a pregnant woman whose boyfriend was to be hanged. I wanted to return to the building on Mapu. I wanted to be amongst the intellectuals.
They
would know what to do. But I didn’t dare.

I ran out of food. The neighbors fed me. I ran out of paraffin, they gave me some. Every day, I walked along the street to see the typewriter who summarized what was going on in the newspapers. My clothes were too tight round the waist. I found a cracked looking glass in the house and stared at myself. My hair looked terrible. I cut most of the blond part out. I looked as if I had come straight from a camp, but fat, not thin. My whole body was round.

While I was camped out in the derelict house in Neve Tzedek two great armies were crossing Palestine in opposite directions.

“What’s news today?” I asked the typewriter.

“The country is bloated with British soldiers disembarking from the ships, it says here they overflow the camp at Sarafand. Poor boys, who thought the war was over and they were going home. But they find there is unfinished business.” He laughed. “They have been sent to fight the Jews. Do you think any of them have ever seen any Jews before?”

Only on the Pathé newsreels, lying around dead, in piles.

“Now in the other direction goes another crowd, the evacuation of the women and children. They are running through the streets purchasing trunks full of clothes. This is strange. Why? I don’t understand.”

“Because at home,” I said, “clothes are still on the ration.”

The time was over, I guessed, when I would be mistaken on the street for a Christian girl. Priscilla Jones would have to be folded up and put away. As for Evelyn Sert, who had entered the country as a biblical tourist, she was no use to me either. So at the very moment when Palestine became a country of Jewish women (apart from the Arabs, who didn’t really matter) I had no identity at all.

“What’s worrying you?” asked the typewriter, folding away his newspaper.

“I haven’t got any documents. I don’t know how to get any more.”

“No one will come here. All will be well. No one is going to harm anyone. They won’t hang those boys in Acre. They wouldn’t dare.”

I don’t know what he knew or didn’t. Probably this was just general conversation but I had to take comfort from what he said. So I thought that
if I could just hold on long enough, I would see Johnny again and everything would be all right.

The baby was growing. It was about eight or nine weeks old. It must have had eyes by now. We lay in bed together at night, two pairs of eyes staring into the darkness.

I stopped painting pictures in my mind. I kept being woken by the sound of bombs going off in the white city. The British imperial identity was disintegrating in front of us, the new Jewish one was being born, but I was nameless and invisible and my little ego couldn’t bear it. I missed my mother. I missed Mrs. Linz. I missed Uncle Joe who surely would have known how to help me. I sat alone among my pile of old newspapers, examining my cracked and dirty nails.

One morning I had had enough of solitude. I decided to take a risk and I left Neve Tzedek to walk to Allenby Street and watch for myself the collapse of the British Empire. I did this so I would have the memory of it to tell my grandchildren.